But Shell's plan now is instead to build an enormous FLNG floating processing plant, a massive 600,000 ton ship which would moor above the wellheads out at sea and turn their gas into LNG, LPG and other products. Tankers will tie up alongside the monster FLNG ship to take on their cargoes, which can then be hauled out to customers worldwide.

Safer for population centres, too. If the floating refinery ever goes "boom" you're not evacuating 10s of thousands of people potentially. Bad for the environment though if the refinery goes "sink", though.

How would they handle the waste water in a refinery of that size? I'll admit I haven't read the article yet, I'll do that next.

Safer for population centres, too. If the floating refinery ever goes "boom" you're not evacuating 10s of thousands of people potentially. Bad for the environment though if the refinery goes "sink", though.

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I think the companies involved after making a massive investment like that (which, note, hasn't been done yet) have to worry about conditions on the sea - water gets too rough/weather goes south, piracy, political turmoil north, sinking. I can imagine that it would be very hard, if not impossible, to insure.

The enormous 480m long ships will be so massive, according to Shell, that they'll be able to shrug off even the most devastating typhoons and remain on station sucking gas. And once the fields are played out, the equipment doesn't have to be abandoned - rather the FLNG megavessel can move on to another "stranded" gas field somewhere else.

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Haven't people learned yet. You don't say that a ship can withstand major storms, hurricanes or that they are unsinkable. That is a sure fire way to make sure it will sink.

Since they say it can withstand a Typhoon it will probably go down in Light Air.

The enormous 480m long ships will be so massive, according to Shell, that they'll be able to shrug off even the most devastating typhoons and remain on station sucking gas.

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Edmund Fitzgerald, at 24,000 tonnes and 222 metres. Not the biggest ship, admittedly. But she went down with all hands during a storm on a lake without getting a distress call out. It was Lake Superior mind you, but still a lake. I'm with velocityg4.... claiming a ship will be too big to sink is like being a security red-shirt on an away-mission during a Star Trek episode.

Edmund Fitzgerald, at 24,000 tonnes and 222 metres. Not the biggest ship, admittedly. But she went down with all hands during a storm on a lake without getting a distress call out. It was Lake Superior mind you, but still a lake. I'm with velocityg4.... claiming a ship will be too big to sink is like being a security red-shirt on an away-mission during a Star Trek episode.

Look up the Gordon Lightfoot song Edmund Fitzgerald for a treat.

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Great song. "The lake it is said never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early...."

I look forwards to seeing it being 'extended' to over 500m then within a couple of decades ending up as a floating rust-heap storing FLNG off the shore of somewhere hot and dry, while everyone else points and stares and says 'Thank God we didn't pay to have THAT built'.

The Fitz sank because two huge waves came along and they were the right distance apart so that the bow was up on one and the stern up on the other. This suspended the middle, which was full of iron, and it then broke in half and sank in seconds. TV images show the two section on the bottom with a big pile of iron in between them.

During WWII passenger liners were used as troop transports. One of them was hit by a rogue wave so big it messed up stuff on top of the ship, way the hell up there. It tipped to within a degree or so of sinking. There were something like 20,000 troops aboard.

I wish they'd put a matchbox next to these things so you can get a proper view of how huge it is.

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That would be cooool.

Or if they could show the silhouette of a man, an elephant, and a dinosaur standing next to it. I can't visualise anything these days without an elephant and a dinosaur. Even better - the dinosaur and the fossil fuel ship next to each other could serve as a "Before and After" shot.

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